The Cover-Up Habit

It’s hard to sympathize with the
Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese’s claim that it could face financial
ruin as a result of paying for its past misdeeds when it continues to
try to cover up those misdeeds. For years, the church here had plenty
of powerful co-conspirators helping them keep quiet about crimes
against children.

Documents just made public in a California
lawsuit settlement reveal that, in 1983, then-Milwaukee County District
Attorney E. Michael McCann, a devout Catholic, advised the diocese to
remove a priest accused of sexual abuse from the ministry “for about
five years, and if no complaints come forth in that time perhaps he can
be given another chance.”

That priest ultimately was accused
of sexually abusing 10 teenagers. How many such cases by that priest
and others could have been prevented if the church had taken
responsibility in 1983 instead of privately conferring with the
district attorney on how to cover its cassocked rear? Anyone who was a
reporter for the Milwaukee Journal in
the mid-’90s, as I was, is aware of the local newspaper’s complicity
with the church in covering up reporting about sexual abuse cases. We
had just hired a new editor from the outside, Mary Jo Meisner. Marie
Rohde, a talented reporter who covered religion, wrote a comprehensive
series on sexual abuse of children by priests that included new
information on the extent to which the Catholic Church, locally and
nationally, had gone to cover up the crimes, paying millions of dollars
in private settlements.

Before the series could be published,
then-Archbishop Rembert Weakland and an entourage from the Milwaukee
archdiocese met with Meisner and Rohde to try to suppress the series.
The reason why other staff members knew about the content of that
meeting is that Rohde was thrilled to be forcefully supported by her
new editor. Meisner told the archbishop that she understood why the
series made him uncomfortable, but that it was the newspaper’s job to
report what it had learned.

Because Meisner had replaced an
editor who was not known for such journalistic courage, the staff was
excited to have an editor who would stand behind reporters. No one on
the staff really knows what happened next. But that series never ran.
The logical assumption is that when the archbishop did not get the
answer he wanted from the editor of the newspaper, he went to someone
higher up at the company.

That’s when Meisner found out she
hadn’t really been hired to make journalistic decisions. Within months,
Meisner began doing what she had been hired to dodownsizing a merged Journal and Sentinel, firing many of the most experienced, able reporters (including me) and retaining younger, cheaper ones.

Rohde
survived the merger, but was removed from the religion beat and sent to
the Siberia of covering suburban village boards. Oh, yeah. About eight
years later, The Boston Globe wrote a series exposing the
extent of sexual abuse by priests and the cover-up within the Catholic
Church. It won a Pulitzer Prize and sparked the national outrage that
is still affecting the church.

Avoiding Responsibility

Instead
of recognizing that the cover-up was as morally reprehensible as the
crimes, the Milwaukee archdiocese has had to be dragged kicking and
screaming into court to get it to come clean. When it has been sued by
victims, the archdiocese has used hardball legal tactics, including
blocking access to church records, conducting brutally aggressive
depositions of victims and purposely delaying cases for years in an
attempt to bankrupt victims and their families. Whenever the
archdiocese succeeded in getting a case dismissed on any kind of legal
technicality, it would sue the victims and their families for the
costs. For years, the archdiocese was protected by courts in Wisconsin,
which upheld a statute of limitations requiring victims of underage
sexual abuse to file suits for damages before turning 35.

However,
last year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the church could be
sued for fraud for not telling parishioners about priests with a
history of sexual abuse before assigning them to ministries that put
them in contact with children.

The only reason we learned last
week about the egregious sexual abuse of another Milwaukee archdiocese
priest was because he committed one of his crimes in California. A
$16.65 million settlement in California included details of nine other
cases involving the same priest in Wisconsin. Instead of the Milwaukee
archdiocese reporting the information itself, Archbishop Timothy Dolan
wrote to priests warning them to prepare for more negative backlash
when the facts were made public.

The Wisconsin Catholic
Conference has opposed a bill in the Legislature that would remove the
statute of limitations for victims of underage sexual abuse.
Interestingly, so has retired District Attorney McCann. Apparently,
covering up crimes is a difficult habit to break.

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Joel McNally is a national-award-winning newspaper columnist and a longtime political commentator on Milwaukee radio and television. Since 1997, Joel has written a column for the Shepherd Express where he also was editor for two years.

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